Chapter 11: Managing the circus
Theme: This chapter describes the problems encountered in trying to manage a program involving two million workers, spread throughout the country and around the world.
October 1958: Thirty-six scientists and engineers were packed together in six rooms in the second story of the unitary wind tunnel building at Langley Field, Virginia. This was the nucleus of the management team that was to direct Mercury. At its height, this project was to have over two million people working for it directly or indirectly, spread from coast to coast and in twelve foreign nations. The final cost of the project was to run $384 million, over $10 million per man in the initial project group.
While this first three dozen was made up of some of the country’s finest, most creative engineers, its management experience was extremely limited. The most experienced manager, Dr. Gilruth, had been responsible for a division at Langley Field with perhaps as many as 150 men. At most, this division had been responsible for spending a million dollars a year. Soon, Dr. Gilruth would be in charge of an organization spending twice that amount every week!
Before October 1958, Robert Gilruth and Max Faget were known only to the small fraternity of aircraft engineers. With the beginning of Project Mercury suddenly their names began to appear regularly in the papers. Their decisions were reviewed not only by their superiors in Washington, but by the press, Congressional leaders, and even the President. Where formerly, decisions could be arrived at in the quiet and privacy of their offices and errors buried in the details of forbidding-looking technical reports, now every action was second-guessed, and re-analyzed, not only by partisans anxious to see the program succeed, but also by jealous rivals who were unhappy over not having been chosen to direct the program themselves.
During the five-year life of the Mercury program, new methods had to be developed for managing the great masses of people, equipment, and materials. They had to be worked out by individuals without prior experience in management of large projects, in the glare of nationwide publicity, and they had to be worked out on a rigid time schedule. In the process, many had their toes stepped on, some fell by the wayside, but in the end, new and effective management techniques were developed with amazing speed.
The success of this whole effort is indicated by the fact that total spending exceeded by only ten per cent the initial estimate, even though this project involved a never-before-attempted engineering feat of putting man in space, a feat which many said could not be done at all. The goal of manned orbital flight was achieved in three years and five months from the project go-ahead, a period slightly less than that required to develop an operational atomic bomb. These achievements are similar in their epochal nature. Each was started by scientists, not managers. This is the story of how the Project Mercury scientists grew into managers.